Literary Impressionism in Walter de la Mare’s Reviews

This chapter considers de la Mare’s reviews of the 1910s, looking at his writing on works by and about three contemporary novelists – Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Dorothy Richardson. The chapter suggests that de la Mare reads these writers as literary impressionists. By invoking literary impressionism, de la Mare engages with a distinct strand of critical thinking that was prominent in Britain in this period. Like a number of his contemporaries, de la Mare saw in the work of Conrad, James, and Richardson a unique literary tendency that today represents an important moment of transition between Victorian realism and modernism.